Thursday, May 15, 2014

External Partners

Description: An important practice in designing quality online courses is making the content accessible to all types of learners. Certain educational tools, such as SoftChalk, give the users the tools to make their content accessible and usable for all.

Join us for this Best Practices in Online Course Design webinar where Richard Smith of Harford Community College will share some of the Best Practices he uses in designing online courses to make content available to all users.

Description: Nothing is so certainly written in the educational book of fate as the end of the textbook as the primary focus of educational content. Digital resources are potentially cheaper, more flexible, more up-to-date, and more reflective of the kind of materials that all learners will need to become proficient with as they seek to prepare themselves for life and learning beyond school. If you are looking for strategies to build your district's capacity to go through the process of replacing any textbook with digital alternatives, join us on May 19 for part two of a two-part series on migrating to digital content. Jonathan Costa will cover:

Description: Leading mobile learning initiatives requires careful planning and attention to the details to help ensure success. With the recent notable implementation nightmares with mobile learning technologies, school leaders are left wondering if the move to this technology make sense. Implementation of iPads in the 1:1 model can be done with great success. In our community’s next webinar, David Mahaley will focus on providing the necessary steps for staff development, student preparation, and administration leadership required to bring iPads successfully into the learning environment.

Find out the key elements of how to ensure the success of a 1:1 iPad initiative from a school completing its fourth year of implementation and learn how to avoid the pitfalls chronicled in recent news headlines.

Description: A ton of research and anecdotal evidence exists that proves an increase in writing proficiency for students who write frequently. Blogging is a great way for students to write online – but teachers often are afraid to encourage students to blog due to privacy and safety concerns. Join New Teacher Coach, Shannon Holden, as he reveals several free (and secure) blogging platforms for students and teachers to use.

There’s an App for that! 50 Apps that will Rock Your World in 60 Minutes!

Description: Is the application market transforming education? In this session, participants will discover apps that change the way students and teachers think about learning. The presenter will feature apps that promote essential 21st century learning skills - creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and apps that fuel creativity. Do you have apps you’d like to share? Please do so here!

Description: Being a teenager has never been easy, but in recent years, with the rise of the Internet and social media, it has become exponentially more challenging. Bullying, once thought of as the province of queen bees and goons, has taken on new, complex, and insidious forms, as parents and educators know all too well.

Join us for our community’s next webinar, led by Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, which explores the culture of bullying and focuses on the individual stories of three students: Monique, Jacob, and Flannery. In the year since this book was published, Emily has traveled around the country talking to students, parents, and educators, and has heard a need from teens to not have adults preach to them about bullying, but to help them have opportunities to have complex conversations about their social experiences.

To support teachers, Emily will be sharing a Teacher’s Guide for using Sticks and Stones in the classroom, which she created with teacher and school director Meredith Garvin of New Haven Academy. The Teacher’s Guide, available for free, includes lessons based on the individual stories of teens in the book. The guide also is aligned to ELA Common Core Standards.

Join us on May 29 to learn how to help your students defeat bullying culture and create a positive school climate of empathy.

Description: You don’t have to do it on your own! This session provides educators with specific strategies to engage students in selecting their own stretch texts from electronic titles, as well as pragmatic tools and priority steps to evaluating your own resources and lessons.

Built for Today’s Learners: How to Design an Engaging Learning Environment for Milennials

Description: Today’s learners, or Millennials, want to rewrite the rules, and collaborate to solve problems. They see institutions as irrelevant, but they also want structure and boundaries. This presents an interesting challenge for school leaders as we attempt to provide creative learning environments for today’s students and staff. In our community’s next webinar, high school principal Dwight Carter will present ideas that will help you transform the learning spaces at your school to better support the way your current students learn. He will share how a team of district administrators and teachers worked closely with an architect to design a new addition to Gahanna Lincoln High School that addressed Millennials’ learning needs.

Design concepts to be covered include:

incorporating flexible spaces for collaboration

including natural light to evoke creativity

upgrading the wireless network to enterprise strength

increasing student voice and choice in how they want to demonstrate their learning

Description: Learn more on how flipped learning has changed the way educators present information, attend this 3-week online course to help you get started in flipping your lessons. The instructional lessons are multi-media rich and contain graded questions and interactive learning games.

Key topics of the complete course (Note: The free, reduced course will have access to Topics 1 – 4 only)

Topic 1: Introduction to “flipped classroom”

Topic 2: Making screencast videos and posting them online - Participants will make a screen capture video presentation on a web site, documents, or paint/draw program.

Topic 4: Making narrated PowerPoint slides, Mac and PC versions - Participants will make a narrated presentation (PowerPoint or Prezi) and post on web hosting sites. (optional resource on using Keynote for Mac).